The University as a Settlement Principle

Territorialising Knowledge in Late 1960s Italy

Francesco Zuddas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351680264
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The 1960s and the 1970s marked a generational shift in architectural discourse at a time when the revolts inside universities condemned the academic institution as a major force behind the perpetuation of a controlling society. Focusing on the crisis and reform of higher education in Italy, The University as a Settlement Principle investigates how university design became a lens for architects to interpret a complex historical moment that was marked by the construction of an unprecedented number of new campuses worldwide.

Implicitly drawing parallels with the contemporary condition of the university under a regime of knowledge commodification, it reviews the vision proposed by architects such as Vittorio Gregotti, Giuseppe Samonà, Archizoom, Giancarlo De Carlo, and Guido Canella, among others, to challenge the university as a bureaucratic and self-contained entity, and defend, instead, the role of higher education as an agent for restructuring vast territories. Through their projects, the book discusses a most fertile and heroic moment of Italian architectural discourse and argues for a reconsideration of architecture's obligation to question the status quo.

This work will be of interest to postgraduate researchers and academics in architectural theory and history, campus design, planning theory, and history.

Part I

Beyond campus

Chronicle

Prologue I

Another campus

In common speech, ‘town-and-gown’ and ‘ivory tower’ are interchangeable labels that attach a sense of exclusivity to the institution of the university. Together, they encapsulate an idea of friction with and necessary detachment from the university’s surroundings that convey the sense of the university as an enclave hosted within foreign territory. ‘Campus’ is the most commonly used word to refer to this enclave occupied by a university, and it is a term almost synonymous with the word ‘university’ itself. It is also a term that has departed from its original attachment to academic environments to signify an increasingly wide array of corporate settlements that wave the flag of ‘knowledge’: knowledge clusters, knowledge hubs, knowledge districts, knowledge parks, and so on. The myth of autonomy is central to the promotion of such places, either because of their location on peripheral sites or, more generally, for their potential to shape corporate identity within clearly identified boundaries. Yet the idea of knowledge as a pure and uncontaminated domain – which is an ideal aspired to on one view of the enclave of the campus – is an impossibility, and this is as true in today’s condition of alleged total connectivity as it is historically. Institutions of knowledge have always been embedded within a socio-political context, and they have very rarely managed to function in real isolation and independence. This reality should be sufficient to demystify any idea of higher education institutions as pure and safe havens set in retreat from the distractions and imperfections of the wider world.

Nevertheless, the idea of a safe haven has ruled over the architectural history of higher education, particularly since modernity has led to such history becoming self-conscious. The pre-modern university has inhabited various spaces, from the cloistered monasteries of the Middle Ages to the palaces of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment – a parasitical use of existing space rather than the construction of a specific, dedicated and new space. Even when structures were designed to purposely fulfil higher education needs – as, for instance, in the case of the Archiginnasio in Bologna – the modest size of the institution did not require thinking beyond the single building. The expansion and new codification of knowledge resulting from the development of modern science since the seventeenth century led to the complication of universities, resulting in larger institutions made of an increasing array of components that corresponded to a widening set of branches of knowledge and methods of inquiry. The birth of the modern university in Berlin in the early nineteenth century paved the way for such complication to unroll over the following centuries – a way that came to be walked with particular confidence on the other side of the Atlantic. Despite its origins in early colonial times – that is, before the new German codification of a university devoted to the indissoluble dyad of research and teaching – the American campus is commonly discussed as the only properly conceived academic space that has managed to interpret the growing complexity of higher education in the conditions of modernity.

One argument of this book (developed in Chapter 1) is that what we call a campus today is the result of a historical trajectory that transformed the original status of the campus as an open-ended spatial diagram into a closed and self-contained spatial object oriented to shaping a community of peers. This historical trajectory resulted in the campus losing its capacity to confront and critique the territorial logics of its time; instead, it gradually took part in the processes of urbanisation, eventually ending up being digested by them. On this reading of the campus trajectory, I build my narrative of this book’s central case study: the debates over and design of universities in Italy at the beginning of the 1970s. My contention is that the type of thinking that grounded these debates and design proposals were closer to an original understanding of the campus than to our conception of it today. Crucially, the present-day conception of the campus was codified and spread internationally precisely in the period that I shall be discussing.

As the baby boomer generation of the 1940s approached college age, and as industrialised societies irreversibly moved towards service-based economies requiring a more educated workforce, the reform and expansion of higher education systems became a paramount priority for Western governments. A quantum leap in the history of universities took place, as never had higher education been so widely debated across a vast spectrum of actors, among whom were state governors, city administrators, vice chancellors, educationalists, sociologists and economists. The debates went hand in hand with a historically unprecedented expansion of higher education. This expansion manifested itself most evidently in the substantial number of new university buildings and entirely new academic settlements that popped up all over the industrialised world. Urban planners and architects were also part of both the debates and the expansion, and their key role in pushing higher education reform in the 1960s has been studied as a central architectural phenomenon of that period. The profound effect of this development on the culture of higher education was wittily captured in a student journal published at the State University of New York, one of more than sixty institutions to receive entirely new or expanded campuses under the auspices of Nelson Rockefeller’s government in the mid-1960s:

Because of the great New Paltz population boom, we found, in our community, another phenomenon of expansion called the LINE. There were breakfast LINES, lunch LINES, dinner LINES, bookstore LINES, registration LINES, snack bar LINES, library LINES, ticket LINES, fee LINES, laundry LINES, and LINES to get on to LINES that head no-one-knows-where. And, beginning in September, there will undoubtedly be another LINE added for paying tuition. AND, the more students, the longer the LINES. ¹

To this day, this story’s narrative has been centred mostly within an Anglo-American context, and it is Anglo-American ideas of higher education that have become a model for most other countries. Inextricably linked to these ideas was the promotion of the university as a specific moment in the life of an individual that required a similarly specific, possibly self-contained and safe environment for it to be nurtured – and even, perhaps, incubated – within. Stemming from these ideas and this way of thinking was the 1960s’ codification of an international campus phenomenon. It is this phenomenon, which I discuss in Chapter 2, that defines, mostly by way of contrast, the fundamental context for understanding the Italian case. I show how its main assumptions and beliefs – namely, that a university campus could be an urban environment on its own, even if located outside a city for pragmatic reasons of cheaper land and easier possibilities of clustering and planned future growth – were actually trapped in a general incapacity to cope with a drastically changing condition that, as I will discuss, has been described as an ‘urban revolution’.

A central ambiguity of the university expansion of the 1960s is located at the intersection between a desire for urbanity and its rejection by a retreat into the countryside. Italy did not escape this ambiguity, as evidenced by the briefs of four architectural competitions launched in the early 1970s that, invariably, indicated expansion and consolidation of higher education in out-of-town sites. Yet an assessment of the Italian case should not be abandoned simply because of this apparent conformity with the international campus phenomenon of that age – an abandonment that, instead, happened at the time of the events, in turn, causing the subsequent almost wholesale disappearance of this chapter from the official histories of postwar university design and, more generally, from architectural historiography. A more comprehensive reading of the Italian architectural and urbanistic response to higher education reform around 1968 requires consideration of the multiple discourses that intersected in ways unique to Italy. In Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, I discuss those Italian discourses, which can be categorised into three main strands: (1) the Italian postwar architectural debate on a changing urban condition; (2) the political debate on higher education reform during a period of centre-left government and reformism; and (3) the counter-debate of the students protesting inside and outside Italian universities and factories. It is only by considering the overlaps, idiosyncrasies and ambiguities of these debates that a better understanding can be achieved of the Italian projects for new universities, and in particular their attempt to prove that higher education could not be limited to a campus – no matter how big or beautifully conceived – but required more expansive thinking and ideas.

The products of the four architectural competitions that I discuss in Chapter 4 – for the universities of Florence, Cagliari, Calabria, and Salerno, in chronological order – clearly stand out from many of their contemporary international counterparts for their megalomania. However, I will argue that they cannot be fully assessed on the same terms as most of the projects that manifested infatuation with the possibilities of building big and that have been historicised under the label of ‘megastructure’. In keeping with a widely accepted reading of Italian architectural culture of that period, the projects for universities can be seen as part of the ideologically imbued approach of a mostly left-oriented architectural community aiming to define a future for Italian urbanisation along the lines of rationally conceived regional dispersion rather than metropolitan concentration. My reading of the four competitions depends on this premise and proposes interpreting the competitions as a parable that recounts the euphoria about an idea of architecturally and formally defined city-territory in the first two competitions suddenly changing into a preoccupation that architecture had succumbed to the force of a growing technological systems-approach.

My narrative argues for the intrinsic value of a type of discussion – chaotic as it proved to be – that I believe has gradually got lost since the 1970s and certainly not only in Italy. This value resides in the attempt to consider higher education as a large-scale issue that cannot be reduced either to the perfection of a building or an array of buildings or to being a mere agent of the opportunistic and authoritarian urban deve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• seriespage
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Dedication
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Timeline
• Introduction University by (urban) design
• Part I: Beyond campus Chronicle
• Part II: Academic territories Four takes
• Conclusion Towards academic commons
• Appendix 1: Conference on university design, ISES (Istituto per lo Sviluppo dell’Edilizia Sociale), Rome, 1–2 October 1970
• Appendix 2: Designing the Italian university: Four competitions
• Appendix 3: Higher education: An international architectural discourse, 1960–1977
• Bibliography
• Index